Posted on 04/14/2007 11:08:02 AM PDT by wagglebee
Which one?
ruined thousands? Who? How? All were wrongly questioned?
The Country that I remember was not terrorized!
I'll gladly sign the loyalty oath. I took the oath along with tens of millions of Americans. What's wrong with that?
The shame is that McCarthy was made the "issue" and national security became secondary.
To the best of my knowledge the CP/USA invented the word "McCarthyism."
Thus anti-communists came under attack not just a man who meant well but lacked the charisma and skills to lead what has proven decades later to have been a true national security threat.
BUMP for excellence in posting!
First of all HUAC was used as a pejorative -- The House Committee on un-American Activities I believe is the correct name.
McCarthy was a Congressman in the late 1940s and participated in controversial hearings which his enemies used to brand him a Nazi. Then when he took on communism that was the end of him.
W.W.II was the last war that the "progressives," "leftists" whatever sided with the U.S. The U.S. helped defend their Uncle Joe.
Clarification: he was a Senator.
Yep. Frankly, it would not surprise me one bit to learn that some clever KGB agent manipulated him into his ridiculous displays in a (successful) attempt to discredit anti-Communist efforts.
The fact that a number of FReepers support the rehabilitation of this joker fifty years after he drank himself into the grave strikes me as evidence of a tragic misinterpretation of the history of the Cold War and the effectiveness of various Red Scares in combating the communist threat. President Eisenhower hated his guts, and the fact that half of his fellow Republican senators voted to censure him speaks volumes about how poorly regarded he and his efforts were in government at the time.
You need to read Ann Coulter's "Treason". She researched the original documents, and he did none of the above.
What you learned in school is incorrect.
No offense guys but could you please name one person who was not a member of the Communist Party who was named as such. I can tell you right now, the answer is zero. But since there are “THOUSANDS” of them, please educate me and list some of them.
One should not make statements of “fact” without knowing what the hell one is talking about.
Mrs. McCarthy came to him at one point and said, “Sergeant, these people from the newspapers are saying they are going to spit on my husbands’s body. Can you do something, please?” He said, “Maam, I will stand at attention with my hand on my sword.” Dad was a Guadalcanal, Pellelieu, and Inchon veteran. God rest him.
No one spat on the senator’s body or casket that day, but that was what our friends inn the press were like, even back then. They loved the wrong Joe. Stalin. Unfortunately, you saw that this writer got the wrong house of congress. The libs do that all the time.
Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them once better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that "The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again. Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed, and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to. And to anyone who questioned the morality, he replied that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the greatest piece of music ever composed. The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.
"The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean." --From "Catch-22," by Joseph Heller
Yeah, there was the black cleaning woman Cohn found for him; she didn’t even know what a communist was. Also the kid lawyer who was a fellow-traveller during the thirties; McCarthy brought up his name during the Army hearings.
By the way, Joe never found one, single, communist.
I am no big fan of Joe McCarthy but the author and some Freepers (such as myself) get a bit tired of the lies that are now accepted as fact regarding the hearings and Sen McCarthy himself. It is the same liberal crap that pratically makes it a felony for a person to wear a Nazi uniform as a costume but a Russian (USSR era) uniform or CCCP memorabilia is “kitschy”. Both should be held in equal disrepute and disgust, but they are not because liberals do not believ the Soviet Union or Communism were a bad thing.
Joe was destroyed by his own arrogance and some bad very advice from Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy. Joe also was sometimes so hungover during morning hearings that he could not stand to pound his own gavel. He drank himself to death.
I repeat: Joe did not find one, single, communist, ever.
Care to explain your keen interest in attacking McCarthy on this forum?
You may be thinking of Annie Lee Moss. There's some uncertainty about whether or not she was a Communist. Most likely she wasn't a spy, but if Moss worked at the Pentagon, she probably did know what one was.
Remember, this was in the 1950s, and to be Black and a cleaner didn't mean that one was stupid or uneducated (Mandatory disclaimer: to be a cleaner doesn't necessarily mean one is stupid or uneducated today either).
Here's a Human Events article on the Moss case. Here's another. Don't know if they're right or not, but the case is more complicated than it might appear at first.
I'm no fan of McCarthy. He did the country a lot of harm by making us look bad at a time when we needed all the friends we could get, but I wouldn't assume that everything said against McCarthy was true either.
Pal, I think you are full of it.
An easy, recent, read is Coulter.
Educate yourself.
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